“Taste of Liberation on Earth: Even When You Are Alive”

There was a time in my life when, whenever I was alone, loneliness would swallow me. I kept looking for other people to comfort me, to tell me I wasn’t alone. One day, when I was lonely and thinking about my love, I was waiting for his comfort. But there was no one. It was so painful.

Suddenly I saw a scene: I was with my love on a yacht, and out of nowhere he pushed me into the ocean. It was a vast ocean, no one around. He pushed me away and left me there. I didn’t know how to swim. I was drowning in the sea, struggling hard to survive, crying and screaming for help. It was dark under the water and I was in deep pain. I felt like this was the end, like I had been left alone in this whole world and there was not a single person who could come and rescue me.

The most interesting part was this: the person who abandoned me there was the very one I trusted the most. I had taken him as my soulmate, my sunshine, the one place where I believed I could love unconditionally and finally be held. And yet, I found myself abandoned like this—not on a shore where it would be easy to survive, but right in the middle of the ocean, drowning and wondering how I would ever escape. He left me exactly when I started completely trusting him, with a blind and unconditional faith.

In that drowning, something opened. Slowly, I started seeing my old pains from childhood. I saw how deeply I had always longed for genuine affection, for someone who could simply listen and hold me. I asked myself: “Is that really too much to ask for? Why am I facing this?”

The answer rose from within: because I had relied on someone else instead of myself. I was always looking for others to hold me; I had never learned to hold myself. I was looking for someone who could make me happy and bring a smile to my face, while I felt almost incompetent to bring that smile to my own face.

So who is really at fault here—him, or me abandoning myself?

In that question, a shift happened inside me.

Relationships began to feel different. I realized I no longer wanted to chase people to regulate my pain or mirror my value. I wanted to come as a whole being, sharing my heart instead of handing it over for safekeeping. I saw that I could love deeply and still choose myself. I could stay open and still say no.

This, for me, is “liberation while alive”: walking through the same world, meeting the same ups and downs, but rooted in an inner freedom no one gave me and no one can take away. It may not be the final destination of the soul, but it is a very real doorway.

And that doorway opened the day I stopped outsourcing my happiness and remembered: the taste of liberation begins in my own heart, even while I am still here on this Earth.

I am enough. I am complete. I am my own love. And now, I even love my pain, because it is my own—inviting me to embrace it, to comfort it, and to gently soothe it.